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Pixel Scroll 1/7/19 Pixels For My Men, Scrolls For My Horses

Eighty years ago, the Marvel Universe roared into existence with the publication of the now-historic MARVEL COMICS #1. Over the years, the company expanded mightily under the guidance of legends Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and countless other industry titans. Today, Marvel is one of the most exciting and recognizable brands shaping pop culture, modern mythology and entertainment around the world – and this year, you can join millions of fans in celebrating MARVEL’S 80TH ANNIVERSARY!

For all of 2019, Marvel will be honoring its iconic characters and stories across every decade of the company’s rich history – from the early years as Timely Comics, to the latest adventures in the Marvel Universe fans know today. Whether you have been following Marvel since the beginning or you’ve just discovered The House of Ideas, you won’t want to miss this year-long celebration across publishing, animation, new media, collectibles, games, and more!

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley notes that many of the stories, such as Samuel R. Delany’s “The Hermit of Houston,” have a clear political message.

“In his author’s note Delany says this is his attempt to write a post-Trump science fiction story,” Kirtley says. “And there were at least two other authors—E. Lily Yu and Charlie Jane Anders—who explicitly say in their author’s notes that their stories were somehow a response to Trump being president.”

Charles Payseur, whose story “Rivers Run Free” leads off the book, agrees that the Yu and Anders’ stories will make readers think hard about current political realities. The Yu story, in which humanity declines to aid extraterrestrial refugees, and the Anders story, in which a trans woman’s consciousness is forcibly transferred into a male cadaver, both grapple with the issue of morally-compromised bystanders.

“I think that both of them do an excellent job of challenging the perspective of not taking action, or being complicit with evil,” Payseur says.

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Charles Payseur in Episode 342 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above)….

What’s being passed around among authors in the last few days:The latest Authors Guild survey, which shows that the median income for all authors (from their books) is $6,080, while the median income for full-time authors is $20,300. That $6k median figure is down significantly from previous years. So if you made more than $6k from book earnings last year, congratulations, you made more than half of your authorial compatriots.

Before everyone panics about the declines too much, please note: “The Authors Guild’s prior surveys were focused on Authors Guild members. For our 2018 survey, we greatly expanded the number of published authors we surveyed to provide a much larger, highly diverse pool and wider perspective,” i.e., the comparing the results this year to previous years isn’t apples to oranges, but might be comparing a Honeycrisp to a Red Delicious….

I’m back home for the first time in a while, and I’ve been given permission to talk more about what’s going on. Last month, my wife Amy was diagnosed with cancer — an aggressive form of lymphoma, to be specific.

Aggressive, but treatable. We’ve done the first round of chemo, and the last scans showed some tumor shrinkage, which is a good sign.

(5) LIPTAK’S NEWSLETTER. Andrew
Liptak, whose contributions to The Verge are
often linked here, launched his own newsletter last year, and just published
the 6th installment. Liptak says —

The goal is to talk about SF/F, storytelling, as well as reading and writing. I’m hoping to grow it a bit, and to use it as a platform to talk about stuff that isn’t necessarily newsworthy — a bit more commentary driven about the content of SF, but also to chat a bit about the general broader SF/F community at some point.

You can find it here: here. 5 of the 6 issues are archived: a 6th is subscriber-locked, which I’ll be using to publish short stories.

…A while ago on Twitter, I asked for suggestions for standalone SF novels — nominally for this list — but also because I was generally interested in finding something different to pick up. One story that came up a lot was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. Orbit recently released the book in the US for the first time — it originally came out in the UK in 2015 and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I picked up both the book and the audiobook, which we listened to on the drive down to PA and back between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

It’s a fantastic novel, and I can see where all the praise is coming from I’ll write up a proper review of it at some point in the coming week, but something stood out for me that’s notable: Tchaikovsky’s use of suspended animation for his characters to play out a story that stretches thousands of years.

He’s not the first to do this by a long shot, but the use here reminded me of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest, and Peter Watts’ Freeze-Frame Revolution, in which several characters drop in and out of suspension, again, over decades and hundreds of years. Both stories use the technology not just as a convenient tool for the characters, but it’s also a neat literary instrument that allows both Cixin and Tchaikovsky to frame their story from one, unwavering perspective….

… According to Frederik Pohl, after years of lobbying and proposals a major studio bit and decided it was going to produce a series of big-budgeted Lensman films. Deals were made, contracts were written, millions of dollars were going to be invested – and the Smith family stood to profit greatly from the entire endeavor.

Then, a video tape showed up on the Smith family doorstep.

Back up. Up until the 1980s, Japan (and much of Asia) worked on a different system of copyright and licensing rights than the Western world; if a Japanese publisher bought the publishing rights to something, under Japanese law they bought the rights to EVERYTHING – including the rights to exploit that property in movies, tv, comics, or whatever. This is one of the reasons why you ended up with things like Batman manga, two different adaptations of Captain Future, etc. Western publishers knew this but worked with it anyway, reasoning that even if someplace like Japan made a TV or movie adaptation of a property it was highly unlikely that copies of it would make their way back to the west, and even if they did, who would want to watch them anyway? (Remember, this was all before the advent of the VCR, and the subsequent tape trading/collecting culture of SF/F media fandom). So when Japanese publisher Kodansha bought the rights to publish E.E. Doc Smith in Japanese in the 1960s, they considered themselves the owners of all the Japanese rights to Smith’s oeuvre. Meaning, they could make TV series or movies of any of it if they chose to, so long as it stayed in Japan….

(7) KGB.Fantastic Fiction at KGB
reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Victor LaValle and
Julie C. Day on Wednesday, January 16, 2019, 7pm at the KGB Bar in New York.

Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle is the author of seven works of fiction and one graphic novel. His most recent novel, The Changeling won the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel. His novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, won the Shirley Jackson Award, the British Fantasy Award, the This is Horror Award for Novella of the Year, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards.

He lives in New York City with his family, and teaches writing at Columbia University.

Julie C. Day

Julie C. Day has published over thirty stories in venues such as Black Static, Podcastle, and the Cincinnati Review. Her genre-bending debut collection, Uncommon Miracles, was released by PS Publishing in October 2018. Julie lives in a small New England town with her family and various pets. You can also find her on twitter at @thisjulieday or on her blog stillwingingit.com

He is best-known for his work on Star Trek across the years, playing the Rura Penth commandant in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the chief Vulcan Science Council minister in 2009’s Star Trek, Data’s “grandfather” Ira Graves in The Next Generation episode “The Schizoid Man,” and as Quatai in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Bliss.”

He appeared in the opening episode of series six of Doctor Who, in an episode titled “The Impossible Astronaut”. In it, he played the older version of the character Canton Everett Delaware III, while his son, Mark Sheppard, played the younger version.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled
by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 7, 1899 – F. Orlin Tremaine. He was the Editor of Astounding Science Fiction and Fact from 1933 to 1937. It said that he bought Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness without actually reading it. Later as Editor at Bartholomew House, he brought out the first paperback editions of Lovecraft’s The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror. He wrote a dozen or so short stories that were published in the pulps between 1926 and 1949. (Died 1956.)

Born January 7, 1912 – Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there has been a number of films using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. (Died 1988.)

Born January 7, 1928 – William Peter Blatty. Novelist and screenwriter best known for The Exorcist though he was also the same for Exorcist III. The former is by no means the only genre work that he would write as his literary career would go on for forty years after this novel and would include Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable which he renamed Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Hollywood Christmas Carol and The Exorcist for the 21st Century, his final work. (Died 2017.)

Born January 7, 1955 – Karen Haber, 64. Wife of Robert Silverberg. Author Of the Fire In Winter series (first co-written with Robert) and the War Minstrels series as well. With Robert, she edited three of the exemplary Universe anthologies that Terry Carr had created. Her Meditations on Middle Earth, her essay collection on J.R.R. Tolkien is quite superb. And of course her prequel Thieves’ Carnival to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas is stunning.

Born January 7, 1961 – Mark Alan Shepherd, 48. The bar patron Morn in Deep Space Nine. His character appeared once in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.

Born January 7, 1982 – Lauren Cohen, 37. Best known as Maggie Rhee on The Walking Dead. She is also known as Bela Talbot on Supernatural, Rose on The Vampire Diaries, and Vivian McArthur Volkoff on Chuck. And she was in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as Martha Wayne.

Born January 7, 1983 – Ruth Negga, 36. She was Raina in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but she left that show as she got a leading role Tulip O’Hare in Preacher. She was also Nikki in Misfits, Queen Taria In Warcraft and a WHO Doctor In World War Z

Born January 7, 1988 — Haley Bennett, 31. First role was Molly Hartley in The Haunting of Molly Hartley. She was also Julie Campbell in The Hole, Stella in Kaboom andJustine Wills In Kristy.

…I’m really glad to be writing more again. I mean, for one thing I’m writing at least twelve pieces of poetry and/or flash fiction a year, because of Patreon. (Obligatory plug: You can get one new piece of my work each month for $1!) Some of my work has been noveling, and some isn’t out yet, so it’s not all visible in this list– but I am really happy to enjoy prose again….

More than 100 years ago acoustic mirrors along the coast of England were used to detect the sound of approaching German zeppelins.

The concave concrete structures were designed to pick up sound waves from enemy aircraft, making it possible to predict their flight trajectory, giving enough time for ground forces to be alerted to defend the towns and cities of Britain.

Invented by Maj William Sansome Tucker and known as sound mirrors, their development continued until the mid-1930s, when radar made them obsolete.

Joe Pettet-Smith set out to photograph all the remaining structures following a conversation with his father, who told him about these large concrete structures dotted along the coastline between Brighton and Dover.

Off the coast of Okinawa, a slim stretch of land among Japan’s southern Ryuku islands, thousands of metres below the surface, there are the remains of extinct hydrothermal vent systems scattered about the ocean floor.

The minerals at these long-dead former vent sites are now gaining attention due to increasing international interest in deep-sea mining. Just one of these deposits is thought to contain enough zinc to supply Japan’s demand for a year. For a country that imports the vast majority of its mineral resources, seafloor sulphide deposits are seen as a tantalising potential domestic alternative. But there is a high price: disrupting these sites through mining could put unique and fragile ecosystems at risk.

(16) AMERICAN GODS RETURNS.
Here’s a sneak peek.

Mr. World (Crispin Glover) and Technical Boy (Bruce Langley) deal with the ramifications of the Season 1 finale in this exclusive clip from Season 2.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Rachel Swirsky, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

I liked Blatty’s novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane, which had some of Blatty’s interest in matters of the soul taking place in a military madhouse reminiscent of Catch-22. Favorite memory was the inmate who was staging an all-dog production of “Julius Caesar,” in which one of the dog actors had the line, “Et tu, White Fang?”

Am I correct in my understanding that Neil hates the adaptation of AMERICAN GODS, and will have nothing whatsoever to do with what they’ve done to it?

It looks complicated, but he’s definitely been involved in it. The characterization of Vulcan was something not from the book that he contributed to season 1, and he co-wrote one version of the season 2 premiere, besides apparent involvement in the turnover chronicled below:

Re: birthdays – Although Charles Addams’ cartoons inspired “The Addams Family” TV series (and hence the movies), my own opinion is that the characters were developed by the TV company itself. There are no names in the cartoons. The only one who actually looks similar (though more skeletal) is the wife (the Gomez equivalent is short, stout and toad-like). There is no “Thing” hand, or Cousin Itt.

The only actual joke I noticed that was carried over is one stand-alone cartoon showing the garden with a sign, “Beware Of The Thing” (in the TV series it was on the front gate) – but of course no explanation for what this Thing was.

When the film company assured the public that their movie version wasn’t based on the TV series but on the original cartoons, I, for one, was not entirely convinced. And what they got completely wrong was to show Thing as a disembodied hand scurrying through the house. In the TV series, Thing was much more ambiguous – was Thing really a single hand that could zip around the property to appear from various boxes, walls etc. – or was Thing a huge multiple creature permeating everywhere, with many hands to pop out wherever needed? It was never clear, never explained – and sometimes Thing (and a similar, Lady Thing) could appear in individual boxes not connected to anything. Thing was a bit mysterious, mystical and inexplicable – which was a great deal of the fun.

Owen Whiteoak, your correction is merited and accurate, right up to “Lady Thing.” I believe they called her “Lady Fingers.” Other than that, you’re batting a thousand, including the annoyance I felt when they claimed the movie wasn’t based upon the TV show, and the reasons therefor.

Jack Sharkey wrote a fairly amusing paperback Addams Family tie-in, consisting of original vignettes. Nothing to do with your comment—I just like to mention it.

@Kip: Having recently seen “You Can’t Take it With You” (for the first time since I was in high school (of course, my high school did “You Can’t Take It With You” – didn’t everyone’s?”)), I think the Adams Family stage musical is based on YCTIWY as much as on the cartoons/tv series/movies (there’s even an equivalent of the “Full Disclosure” game – in YCTIWY, it’s a “free association” game).

Andrew: Mine did! I remember painting flats for it. I designed a wallpaper, and gridded the flat with the chalk line and spray painted each repeat of the fleur-de-lys in two colors. I made one upside down, but by the time that occurred to me, the only place left to put it ended up being covered by a couch.

Owen, that’s one of the things I liked about the paperback. It went a little farther than the series in that regard. I remember them having a party (with the requisite befuddled outsider along), and the pinata* turns out to be full of mustard gas.

The series did get a number of gags from the comic strips, like the headless doll, the child’s room full of purloined DANGER signs, blowing up the train set, and some of the plants in the conservatory.

(9) Jan 7, 1934 — Flash Gordon is born on the Sunday comic pages of newspapers all over America, brought to life by artist Alex Raymond, who also scripted it for the first 1-1/2 years. The “topper” for the strip, and also created by Raymond and debuted that day, was Jungle Jim, but he wasn’t particularly genre-ish.

Flash and Jim were created to directly compete with the newspaper strips for Buck Rogers and Tarzan, both of which coincidentally debuted as comic strips on Jan 7 1929. Tarzan was pretty well established, having first appeared in the Oct 1912 issue of the pulp magazine All Story, but Buck was much less well known. He had first appeared in Amazing Stories, Aug 1928, in a novella by Philip Francis Nowlan called “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” The strip was drawn by Dick Calkins and written by Nowlan, and it was on the funny pages that the character really took off.

(Hat tip for all this information to Art Lortie, who makes the convincing argument that Jan 7 is the most important day in comic strip history.)

@3: an interesting addition to the Brunner column linked yesterday. I doubt it will change any minds — people will believe all authors are rich based on the 1% of 1%, just as kids will believe they can become rich as sports stars — but the truth really is out there in this case.

@5: the provided link for overall access appears to go to a subscriber-locked login panel; what am I missing?

@11 is a good response to the heavy hand of the original link.

@Owen Whiteoak: there is a ~hand in at least one Addams cartoon, in which a couple of humanoid arms reach out of a console phonograph to change the record. As to who developed the characters: I recall reading a set of TV-show specs reportedly written by Addams himself — he may have decided (e.g.) that Gomez should have more flair in a continuing series. (No citation — this was skimming a dealer’s table, probably at least 25 years ago given my mental image of the site.)

@Andrew: my high-school theater was Serious (and/or retro); 2 Shakespeare comedies, Streetcar, and Where’s Charley for the musical. OTOH, this was the Meaningful late 1960’s; OMMV.

@Chip: Impressive. My high school was much more conventional: Camelot, You Can’t Take It With You, Oklahoma, the Uninvited, a bunch I don’t remember, and a version of Deathtrap that left out the homosexual relationship.

Darren Garrison says I don’t know about Gaiman, but I think the adaptation is utter garbage.

I read the Hill House edition when I got it for review and thought it was a splendid novel. I’ve no attention of sullying my memories of that novel by watching this series. I like my series original, not based off of existing properties.

of course, my high school did “You Can’t Take It With You” – didn’t everyone’s?”

Mine didn’t and in fact, I’ve never even seen the play, though I’ve seen the film.

The musical Linie 1 was one of the most performed German plays of the 1980s. Of course, my highschool did a production. It’s still a popular highschool play. Our musical club also did Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, Joseph and the Amazin Technicolor Dreamcoat (the head of the musical group was also a religious education teacher, hence a taste for biblical musicals),The Jungle Book, Little Shop of Horrors, Wer kennt Jürgen Beck? (Who knows Jürgen Beck?) and a Hungarian musical called A Fictional Report About an American Rock Festival, which was so bloody depressing (and after Linie 1 and Jürgen Beck, that was something) that even die-hard members of the musical club balked. It was something about drugs, Nazi flashbacks and the Monterey rock festival. Why anybody thought that performing this play in a West German highschool in 1988 was a good idea I don’t know.

On the drama front, my highschool performed such post-war highschool favourites as Ab heute heußt du Sara (From today on your name is Sara) by Inge Deutschkron and Andorra by Max Frisch, a play I hate to this day, because on the day we went to watch it with the whole class, my Mom made pea soup for lunch and I subsequently experienced a very noisy, very embarassing and unsuppressable farting attack during the very serious play. The drama club also performed It was the lark by Ephraim Kishon, which was hilarious. I recall that after the bloody depressing Hungarian musical bombed, they started playing lighter and funnier plays.

Finally, we also performed Bremer Freiheit (Bremen Freedom) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, because it was based on a famous local 19th century serial killer case. I played the lead, Gesche Gottfried who killed 15 people via arsenic poisoning, was eventually caught and beheaded. No beheading scene in the play, though I dramatically swept my hair aside and dropped to my knees on the stage in the final scene (the play ends with Gesche reciting a prayer), before the lights went out.

Coincidentally, the spot on the Bremen market square where the head of the real Gesche Gottfried rolled after she was beheaded is marked with an X on a cobblestone. I’m pretty sure it’s no longer the real spot, since the market square has been dug up and recobbled several times, but the crossmarked stone is still there and it’s a local custom to spit on it. I usually visit it, whenever I’m in the neighbourhood, though I never spit on the stone, not since I played Gesche.

Cora, did any of the schools where you were ever put on Lemonade Joe, aka Limonadovy Joe? I know they do in the former Czech Republic, where the movie is still popular enough that I’ve seen derivative works—parodies, references in other things, and so on. The play that the 1966 (or so) movie is based on was written in the late 1930s, and in the course of looking for good copies of the movie online I’ve run into school productions. I’d like to see it staged here, in English, but that would run into work as I don’t think there’s a translation readily available.

@Andrew
I don’t know if my high school did – at that time, they did a senior play and a musical (IIRC there was also an all-school play, but I don’t have anything to back that memory). I remember they did “Teahouse of the August Moon” and “Music Man” when I was a sophomore, and as a senior it was “Dracula” and “Bells Are Ringing”. (I think when I was freshman, there was “Harvey” and “Charley’s Aunt”.)

@Michael J. Lowrey: Besides what James said, Gaiman has said nothing but extremely positive things about the show – including the material that was original to it. This for instance, and lots of other interviews like it. So whatever you heard seems very inaccurate.

Just a reminder that hotel reservations for this year’s Worldcon go live 12 hours from now. If you didn’t receive an e-mail link, you will want to contact them at registrar@dublin2019.com to get that sorted.